Ashlee Simpson, Lucky Star

This is Ashlee Simpson’s video for her song Bat For A Heart which looks to me like a millennial version of Madonna’s Lucky Star. She says “f-ck” and it’s supposed to be hardcore.

How many different things has Ashlee Simpson tried to be? And is it unfair that we are critical of her, um, evolution because of her last name? At the beginning, when she fronted like a poseur Avril Lavigne -- in and of itself hilarious, someone posing like a poseur, and totally unironically -- Joe Simpson was all over it, and had probably created it. Every Ashlee iteration since then was presumably manufactured the same way: Emo Ashlee married Pete Wentz and stopped curling her hair. And that was supposed to convince us that she was the antithesis of her Porny sister.

Maybe she IS the antithesis of her Porny sister. Maybe Ashlee Simpson really IS whoever it is that she’s telling us she is. Maybe we shouldn’t define her by her family and that lip-synch incident on Saturday Night Live. But this is the problem with the marketing of the pop star -- if you’re good at it, the public won’t let you change. And if you suck at it, we get suspicious when you want to change, even if the “change” happens to be real. If there is such thing as “real”. Not to get super meta about it but when they’re pushed towards fame so early, is there ever really a “real” version of themselves? This is why so many of them end up in an existential crisis (see Miley Cyrus) at the age of 22. Between being told who you are and then told who you should become, when do they ever get to decide for themselves?

Attached - Ashlee Simpson with friends in New York a couple of weeks ago.